Dead Games

Look, we all know I never finish projects.
I get a lot of neat ideas, alright? So things don't often get finished. But the ones I'm motivated enough to see through the end are usually the best ones... Or maybe they just become the best because they're actually finished, heh...
I haven't released a full game in over a year. Sad, really. Hopefully I'll get one done some time soon...

Anyway, you may be interested to take a look at some of my older games that I never ended up finishing.
Here are a few interesting ones:







These are from a game that, as you can probably see, was a scrolling shooter. I'm a pretty big fan of good scrolling shooter types... I haven't played any interesting ones in a while.
Anyway, this one was fairly traditional, but it did have some interesting things going for it.
It had a sort of steampunky setting, first of all, which, while not altogether unheard of, isn't as common as the normal airplane/spaceship stuff.
Also there was a health display that I still think was pretty neat. It was a sort of radar / graph thing that fluctuated up and down; it went to higher levels when you had more health.
Then there was a system that kept track of how much enemy aircraft you had shot down by displaying them as skulls on the left (it was supposed to be similar to the stuff they paint on the sides of planes; swastikas for nazis shot down in WWII, etc.). They slowly decreased, but if you could reach a quota and maintain it until the end of the level, you would be awarded with a special magical attack that could be used a certain number of times per level... They were area-affecting attacks set off with the mouse (giant fireballs and such).
Work on this died out after two levels or so... I moved on to other stuff, I guess.
This one is pretty old, and it kind of shows. It's extremely unlikely that I'll ever come back to this, and if I do, I'd probably start over from scratch.





I've always liked platform shooters quite a bit, too. I had wanted to do one for a while, and finally I was competent enough with GM to do one. I was focusing more on just "making a platform shooter engine" than doing a whole game, so it's not such a huge deal that I never finished with this. I did have ideas for stuff in case I decided to keep going with it, but that never happened. I just got movement, aiming, and shooting down, as well as some basic enemies and destructible blocks.
I don't think I ended up reusing any of this engine, although I did borrow some techniques for later use. Platform shooters I've messed with since then, however, have not featured diagonal aiming.
It's not likely that I'll ever go back and finish this, as ideas I have for it live on in more recent projects (which will probably never surface either, but meh).






This was going to be an open-ended exploration game that put you in control of a submarine called the Proteus and let you explore weird underwater environments and uncover interesting secrets. It never really got of the ground, though; I just did a (pretty cool) submarine graphic, did some basic movement stuff, and put it into a weather thing I had put together. The rain would have only been seen on the surface anyway, of course... I had planned on putting a lot of work into little details like that, so from the start I knew I would probably never finish.
It might be neat to come back to this some day, but I'm not very confident that it will happen.








This game put you in control of one object, but when you found another controllable object you could move up to it and press down. Then you would take control of the new object, and from then on you would be able to switch between the objects in your control by clicking on them.
It was going to be a sort of puzzle/exploration game without any real goal. You would move around, using the abilities of the objects you controlled to access new areas and more objects to control.
The top can spin around to gain speed, and when it's going fast enough, it creates sparks and can smash through obstacles. The rocket can fly for a period of time (eventually it can't go any further and will fall to the ground). The pot can sit in water for a moment to fill itself up, and then it can be poured out somewhere else.
It would have been a pretty interesting game, and out of all of these, I think I'm most interested in finishing this one (but it's still very unlikely that that will ever happen, since I keep getting "better" ideas).


Well, I hope you enjoyed this and/or found it interesting... I could do it a bit more in the future too; I have quite a few dead games.
I may even release playable versions of some, but they never got very far along... I guess it would be interesting to look at them though.